Tuesday, 22 July 2008

The rule of 2.98

That is: 99p for a Heineken. 99p for a Gino's Pepperoni Pizza. And 99p for another Heineken.

So
I felt very much at home having dinner at Peter's flat in Romford this
evening, taking the couch and pacing while he laid down tracks for
Hamlet and we tried to find a sound for Zeus. Romford's in Zone 6. It's
very spacious, although the Rom itself is only four foot wide at low
tide, as I discovered for myself when we stepped over it. Its banks are
concrete and it is totally odourless. The brick streets on the way to
the flat were practically empty at eight, and as I made my back at
eleven there were three or four points of light, and a live band
somewhere, but nowhere selling apples, and the streets still pretty
empty. Empty in the same way that most of America is empty, good empty.

It reminded me more than anything else of the film Brick. It made me miss my camera. It made me want to scout for locations. But what does this mean?

The
train back was also empty except for the scattered pictures of Heath
Ledger's Joker (this modern world so stable and Utopian that box-office
takings in America now make the front page) so I'd thought I'd pass on
another scary clown anecdote to go with the Deburau story, in lieu of moody shots of the Rom...

It concerns the first ever appearance of Ronald McDonald, pasted below. Now my homeboy Tom,
who has something of an in into the clown world, told me once that the
performer in question was so disgusted with his own appointment that he
took everything he had ever learnt about "correct clown proportioning",
then purposefully set out to create as off-putting a Ronald McDonald as
he could. Well, it clearly had a lasting affect on Stephen King. And
Matt Groening. And it goes a little something like this: